Rant-omization

There are moments (like now) when a place like Greenland or Ankh-Morpork or even at the feet of a rumbling volcano seem like much better places to be.  I am weary of politics, of Megan Kelley and her fake news, of sensational journalism that leaves your heart pounding and your head full of doubts,  I am weary of  all of it.  Oh, to be somewhere where English is not spoken with any regularity and then only badly.

If I had a TV I would turn it off and eat doughnuts.  If I had doughnuts. Funny thing about doughnuts.  There is no such thing as enough.  Too few, or too many, but never enough.  they never come to the point where you say, oh look, there are three doughnuts left, let's save them for later.

With doughnuts, there is no later, only before, and right now.

Sunday poem--Edna Millay

Portrait by a Neighbor

Before she has her floor swept
Or her dishes done,
Any day you'll find her
A-sunning in the sun

It's long after midnight
Her key's in the lock,
and you never see her chimney smoke
Til past ten o'clock

She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon,

She walks up the walk
Like a woman in a dream
She forgets she borrowed butter
And pays you back in cream

Her lawn looks like a meadow
And if she mows the place,
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne's Lace

Magic numbers

76 Trombones

3 Men in a Boat

7 Days in May

1 Is the Loneliest Number

39 Steps

15 Men on a Dead Man's Chest

40 days and 40 nights

50 Ways to Leave your Lover

Tea for Two

Eight is Enough

7 Brides for 7 Brothers

Ocean's Eleven

Thursday 13


https://newthursday13.blogspot.com

#6 Poem for a Sunday

The Road Not Taken

                        Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.

Update of the last three weeks

The radiators have been installed
The oil burner and oil tank are plumbed up and functioning
We replaced the old water pump and tank so running the water
no longer sounds like a cement mixer gone awry

The second batch of wood has arrived
We are now involved in installing a downstairs bathroom
I'm trying to figure out where to put the furniture now since having radiators
under the windows changes things immensely
Discovered that the south windows need some putty and paint work

three replacement (wallboard) walls are installed and painted
and the plaster that came down is now in the driveway. 
Annnd there is a skin coat of plaster dust from one end of this house
to the other. (deep aggrieved sigh, here)

The days are now cooler at either end and shorter too.
How did that happen?

We have noticed one of the wild turkeys is lame--
not from an injury, but it looks to be one of those birth things.
She hobbles when she walks, and up until now her siblings
take pains to keep her in the middle of the pack.  Then I noticed today
when I went outside, the other turkeys scattered, but she
took flight with  great sweeping wings, and ended up in a pine tree.
She can't run, but she can fly.  Bravo, lady, for figuring that out.

T13 homophones T13

hoarse horse

coarse course

burred bird

bare bear

bored board

fair fare

hare hair

earnest Ernest

idle idol

write right

banned band

barred bard

foul fowl

(feel free to add your own)

New Thursday 13

For a slow summer day

a deceptively simple game of addition
which, if you're into these kinds of things
should keep you busy the way a bit of yarn
amuses a cat. (forever)


https://play2048.co/

Facebook account

It's like trying to lose a burr while wearing mittens.  Baaack and forth baaaack and forth...

Apparently some years ago my husband opened a 'temporary" (long chuckle here) account at FB, to communicate with some members of the  planning board here in town.  Then he forgot about it. I had no idea he had an account,  until the other day when I started getting (we share the email account here) 'notifications' from FB that someone (ominous music in background) had 'tried to access' his account. 
O, really.

He said, what account?  Then he said, 'oh, wait a minute...'.    He said, go in, and delete it.  He could not believe the number of friends he had picked up in that time period, including an old friend of mine  AND her greatgrandchildren,  and I must admit it was neat seeing  her holding the last baby.
But.  I started deleting and deleting AND deleting, and ten minutes later the account was clear and it only took twice that long to get out completely. They really want your business in there. 
I said, I want to delete the account. REALLY?  ARE YOU SURE????  '
 yes, please.  IT CAN'T BE UNDONE, YOU KNOW.

yes, I know. Delete.

WE GIVE YOU 30 DAYS IN CASE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND. ARE YOU SURE?"

I'm sure. Delete.

YOU HAVE UNTIL SEPTEMBER 11 TO CHANGE YOUR MIND.  AFTER THAT...

Delete.

WELL. OKAY...

I just KNOW by September 11 we will be getting at least five poignant emails...

(So the sad eyed puppy has gone to his new owner as we wave goodbye from the driveway.) 

Poem #5--

The Horses --Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
“They’ll molder away and be like other loam.”
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
                                        And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

now and then simple works best

I was futzing around with my terribly old  Photo Draw program and thought, let's see if I can draw a flower.  I am ridiculously proud of this. 

this 'n' that

Arm and Hammer

Ligget and Meyers

Fred and  Wilma Flintstone

Jack and Jill

Pat and Mike

Roy and Dale

Sonny and Cher

Simon and Schuster

Penn and Teller

Lewis and Clark

Martin and Lewis

Black and Blue

Princess and the Pea


Thursday13

4. Poem of the week --Lester Clark Rudd

In the golden age of women's magazines, when they were less glitz and more good reading, they would have as many as a dozen or more poems scattered through the pages.  Robert Frost, Edna Millay,  Dorothy Parker.  Some of my favorite poems came from there, and I mourned the ending of this practice.
This was one of the first I saved.



Lullaby For an Ill Child
                   Lester Clark Rudd

North Wind's hair is very black
     and thick, if you happen to see it;
North Wind's face is very soft
     and smooth, if you happen to touch it;
North Wind's voice is very strong
     and sweet, if you happen to hear it.

I'm telling you this, for you ought to know,
And you mustn't be afraid.
If you're chilled by the ice and the terrible snow,
You can find a nest in her braid.
You can curl like a kitten and ride in her hair,
And find it quite warm behind her.

I'm telling you this, because I was there--
And she waits now for you to find her.